TL;DR
- Manjaro’s OrangePi Neo is only the latest handheld console to face challenges due to memory and storage shortages.
- The OrangePi Neo was designed to use either 16GB or 32GB of LPDDR5 and ship in H1 2026.
- The project is now indefinitely “on ice.”
What a positively garbage timeline we’re living in when it comes to consumer electronics. It was all going fine — tech kept getting better, more powerful, and more affordable. And then the 2020s rolled around, and everything went to hell. Right now, component prices are skyrocketing while availability takes a nose dive. As we brace to find out just how badly that’s going to affect smartphones, we’re already seeing handheld consoles feel the hit. And now the latest to join that ignoble club looks like it’s the OrangePi Neo.
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The Neo’s supposed to be an upcoming Linux-based gaming handheld running Manjaro, powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 chip and featuring a 7-inch FHD+ 120Hz screen. The project’s been in development for years now, and the idea was to sell it in two different hardware configurations, one with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM for $450, and one with 32GB RAM for $550.
As you probably know, RAM is at the center of this current crisis, and DDR5 chips are among the most desirable — so, of course, this is now a problem. In an update posted last week to the project’s status page, Manjaro’s Philip Müller shares the bad news:
Due to high prices of DDR5 RAM and SSDs the project is currently on ice. Certifications for CE and FCC are now complete. Also a lot of improvements around the Manjaro Gaming Edition had happened. We are now waiting for a good time to launch the product …
That’s not great, and ending the message with an ellipsis like that has us feeling less than confident about future prospects here. Manjaro had shared a H1 2026 target for shipping the first OrangePi Neo units, but at this point, we’re not even sure if late 2026 might still be in the cards.
For a product that was already this far along, redesigning at this stage to use different memory components is probably quite impractical, so Manjaro might really just be stuck waiting this mess out. That’s probably not what anybody wanted to hear, but on the plus side, just think how nice things must be for everyone in alternate-reality 2026!
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